Pick Your Own Muscadines
Pick your own muscadines for a great farm experience this fall! It won’t take long to fill your container, and you’ll have a family experience to remember — plus a lot of muscadines to enjoy! Many farms also offer ready-picked grapes, other muscadine products, or other produce, and other on-farm activities. To find a farm near you, check out the listings and map below. You can also call your local Cooperative Extension office. We know that not everyone is in our directory, but we’re working on it!
Basic U-Pick advice
- Call before you go to make sure the farm will be open and find out its hours. Also ask if you should bring your own picking containers.
- Dress appropriately for weather and walking in the vineyard.
- Keep an eye on your children to make sure they are respectful of the vineyard and don’t wander off.
- Remember that very small children won’t be able to reach the grapes themselves. If they want to help you will need to lift them up or assign them a job like holding containers or counting grapes.
- Don’t leave your grapes in a hot car while you run other errands on the way home.
Picking: Go for ripe! Muscadines won’t continue to ripen or get sweeter after you pick them. Ripe grapes are fully colored and slightly yielding to the touch, and not as shiny as under-ripe grapes. They detach from the stem easily when you touch them. Clusters don’t all ripen at the same time, so gently “tickle” the cluster to get the ripest grapes. Train yourself — and your kids — by tasting a few as you start to pick.
Storing your grapes: You can leave your grapes on the kitchen counter for a day or two, but it’s better to refrigerate them in a closed container. Then they will last for a week or more.
Using your grapes: It’s so easy to pick muscadines, you may come home with quite a few — and there are lots of ways to use them. Check out our Recipe Collection for some suggestions. You can also freeze grapes for later use.
Below are listings of member Pick-Your-Own vineyards. At the very bottom of the list is a map you can use to find farms nearest you.
